Category Archives: Economics

The limits of transactional thinking

Posted on May 10, 2024 by koenfucius

Featured image: mh.xbhd.org/Flickr CC BY 2.0 Customers who treat their relationships with their suppliers of the goods and services as limited to the individual transaction may overlook something that is of much more value than they realize Markets are instrumental … Continue reading →

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Suspicious minds

Posted on May 3, 2024 by koenfucius

Featured photo: Pixabay People can be too sceptical, and irrationally turn down offers that are genuine. Or might that not be as irrational as it seems? Imagine a mad billionaire makes you the following offer: he will pay you an … Continue reading →

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A craving for certainty

Posted on April 5, 2024 by koenfucius

(featured photo: Bill Reynolds/Flickr CC BY 2.0 Even if we know we cannot avoid uncertainty, we continue to pursue certainty. Retirement planning. It’s one of the classic topics in behavioural economics: most people realize they should be saving (more) for … Continue reading →

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Transparent or opaque?

Posted on February 23, 2024 by koenfucius

(featured image via Dall-E 3) Transparency, especially related to people’s incomes, may not be as desirable as we think Relativity is widely associated with Albert Einstein (even though many people have, at best, only a vague idea of what the … Continue reading →

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Are agriculture and nature poles apart?

Posted on February 16, 2024 by koenfucius

The trickiest of decisions are those where either/or is out of the question. The farmers’ protests in Belgium have been continuing unabated this past week, though an agreement was reached this morning. One of their grievances is their feeling that … Continue reading →

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The asymmetry of importance

Posted on February 9, 2024 by koenfucius

(featured image: <Bus stop.jpg> made with Dall-E). We tend to assume that in interactions with others, their view of the importance of the interaction matches ours. That assumption may be wrong, and can be problematic “No man is an island, … Continue reading →

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A large number of small amounts

Posted on February 2, 2024 by koenfucius

(featured image: Het Luilekkerland, Pieter Bruegel the elder, Wikimedia Commons/PD) Our intuition struggles to correctly interpret the combination of very large and very small numbers The medieval mythical land of Cockaigne, graphically represented by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in his … Continue reading →

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Rational borrowing, irrational repaying

Posted on January 26, 2024 by koenfucius

(featured image: <Lloyds bank.jpg> Moneybright/Flickr CC BY 2.0) There may be more to debt than meets the financial eye. What characteristics makes humans uniquely human among the animals? Many of the obvious candidates turn out to be a matter of … Continue reading →

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Activist thinking – curse or blessing?

Posted on January 19, 2024 by koenfucius

featured image: Alisdare Hickson/Flickr CC BY SA 2.0) There is much to criticize in activism (especially by economists), but is it all bad? Imagine your kidneys have ceased functioning, and you have been needing dialysis for months, waiting for a … Continue reading →

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It’s the demand, stupid

Posted on December 22, 2023 by koenfucius

Markets, and indeed most of the interactions between people that involve some form of exchange, are about supply and demand. Economics treats both as equals and is mostly concerned with the equilibrium between the two, but from a human nature … Continue reading →

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